[Transcript] Leveraged Supply Chains – Episode 8: Steve Andrews

Andrew (00:06)
Most procurement leaders don't lose time in the big strategic stuff. They lose it in the messy middle. Acknowledgements, promise dates, pricing mismatches, follow-ups, and exceptions that turn your inbox into the system of record. Today's episode is about procurement systems that actually stick. Not the demo, not the roadmap, but the reality. How a supply chain leader evaluates tools, gets adoption, and prevents the process from decaying back into the chaos.

Welcome back to the Leverage Supply Chains. I'm Andrew Stroup your host. Steve Andrews is joining me and is a supply chain and procurement leader who's lived the hard parts, buying decisions, implementation, change management, and operating inside real world constraints. Steve, welcome to the show. For listeners who don't know your background, what kinds of problems have you consistently been pulled into as a supply chain leader?

Steve Andrews (00:55)
Well, thanks for having me on Andrew. Nice to be here. I've spanned a couple of different fields within supply chain. starting with the broadest strategic sourcing, either for mergers and acquisitions or private equity. The second thread was actually doing system implementations for e-sourcing and contract lifecycle management systems that bolted up to ERPs.

And then most recently interim director of supply chain for a private equity owned company trying to automate the supply chain so that it can scale for the growth projections that they had upon acquisition.

Andrew (01:25)
Got it. Well, you know, I guess with that and kind of the through line across all those roles, what are some of the failure modes that you've seen or keep seeing? And, you know, I think almost in the framing of like, I've seen this movie before, Signal, you notice early.

Steve Andrews (01:40)
So I think the biggest thing is everybody now wants to rush to agile. Let's do it as quick as possible. And I think they forget sometimes the detail within supply chain. Two biggest mistakes I see is that the strategy is not translated into how are the buyer's actions going to change tomorrow as a result of implementing the strategy.

And then two, thinking through master data governance. At the end of the day, it's important that your master data gets back into your ERP system of record and that it stays clean. So through all of this, it can't get a lot of noise or bad data introduced into the system. And if you take those two things into account, your success rate goes up substantially, where if you try to shortcut either one of those, you'll wind up with a system that's live, but no one's using it.

Andrew (02:29)
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think that's probably what we've always seen. It's like the worst fear, right? Is that you go through all this process, you do all the hard work and then it doesn't get there. And I think that's not a, it's not a single thing, but kind of a momentum building and a lot of different pieces, which is obviously why we're chatting. But, you know, even before we get into the tech and those pieces, like what's your working definition of a procurement system that does stick? I mean, is it sticking, you know, six months after go live? it.

the failure mode testing and symptoms that you're tracking would love to hear how you frame that.

Steve Andrews (03:03)
think for procurement specifically, right? What's important is that your buyer's team is actually logging into the system or getting the outputs of the system on a daily basis. within, six months or nine months, the metrics that I would look for is, know, is the data being used? What number of my purchase orders are being impacted by the system? What percent of spend is being impacted by the system? And is it effective, right? Do we trust the data?

or is everybody questioning what comes out of it?

Andrew (03:32)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, the classic data junk in data junk out model. and ultimately, you know, it's, it's that rep cycles of those users practicing and getting comfortable in a, in a new mode of operandum, if you will. And I think that's actually a good transition because talking through, why most procurement workflows quietly collapsed back into emails, spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, the old way of doing things.

In your experience, why do procurement systems fail after launch? I mean, even when the intent is good.

Steve Andrews (04:03)
I think the two biggest things, one I mentioned earlier, right? The strategy was never translated into day-to-day activities, So we had this great PowerPoint deck, great sales deck. The executives saw this wonderful dashboard, but didn't realize what it took to get the dashboard to work in the real world in their company, Data cleanups are required. But the second biggest thing is, excuse me, the second biggest thing is not having an owner that's in the buyer's group, So as a director, I could own it for so long.

But if I don't have anybody actually owning it, day to day, that's where it's going to fail. Like, on the implementation that you did at one of the portfolio companies that worked out, I drove that for what the first six months really hard, but I did not drive that for the last year. The team owned that the buyer's team owned the weekly calls and the troubleshooting. And that's important, right. They have to own it.

so that they don't just give up and let the foot off the gas and to your point, go back to emails and doing it offline, right? If they own it, then that system has success in sticking after the implementation's over.

Andrew (05:05)
Absolutely. Well, you know, and that was actually one of my follow up questions was, you know, what, is that thing? And it definitely seems like process ownership is a huge aspect of that. But at the same time, what's, what's the like most common, we didn't think about this edge case that you have seen or you did.

Steve Andrews (05:21)
So I think the two areas that pop up the most, is

not underestimating the end user's willingness and creativeness to circumvent the system. It always impresses me how hard people will work to not use the system. And, you know, and I think one of the there's there's a little meme out there that has like a sidewalk. It looks like on a college campus of intended usage and the little footpath through the grass of actual usage. And you need to account for that.

Right. So, and how do you do that? Well, one, think it's making sure that you've mapped through all of the processes and you have all of the different use cases mapped out. Now, I'm not saying that the system has to handle every single use case, but you have to identify we're going to, we're going to take these 80 % of the use cases are in the system. Now 10 % on this side and 10 % on this side, they're going to be offline because it's R and D. It's some really

offline kind of thing that we don't want to automate in a tool. But at the end of the day, how did the results of that offline work get back into your ERP system? If you've accounted for that, I think that works well. You mentioned emails earlier and especially on contract lifecycle management systems. I can't tell you the number of times where I've tried to tell a client, you don't want emails for everything. Log into the system, look at the dashboard. No, no, no, no, I want an email. So we put the email in.

Within three weeks ago, I get the frantic call like, please make the email stop. I don't want any more emails, right? So those are probably the two biggest areas where, people are surprised if you've not been through this, you know, a number of times.

Andrew (07:00)
Well, that's actually a great segue because, you know, I know we've been talking about the tactical users, but what's the inverse of that, the hidden tax and procurement that executives underestimate? is it the actual, go live, how does the time distribute between like, you know, buyers, expeditors, AP receiving, like what's the operational cost of not knowing all that context? I think that's always an interesting flip side of that,

Steve Andrews (07:21)
Well, you know, if you allow for a failed implementation, right? I break out the cost and you know, what's my cost for the provider, for the software, for the implementation team. What's the internal cost of the resources that are working on it? To me though, those are the tip of the iceberg. Because as soon as you have a failed system implementation, you've done two really bad things that will last for years after, One is you've lost a lot of credibility of procurement systems and what they can do.

Two is you've just enabled all those creative people I just talked about that like to circumvent systems. You've just given them a clear pass to stay in the rut that they're in. So it's really important when you're first looking at putting systems in, even if I want to do this, this much work upfront, right? Start with something small and meaningful. That's impactful. Get successes on that, prove that it works and then build from there.

I would rather do six small successful implementations than try to do one big bang and have it fail at the end of the day. The other part of that is just, to your point about the executives, right? Executives have a responsibility because even though you've empowered the local team, buyers are having problems with AP or they're having problems with IT, you have to have an escalation mechanism where they can go above

each individual organizational silo and have somebody at the executive level that's listening to it and make rational choices of what needs to get changed or what needs to get implemented and resolve conflicts at the business unit level. So if you have a steer code and executive communication and decision-making matrix, you empower that team to raise issues they can't solve on their own and get fixed.

Andrew (09:03)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and you know, that leads into like more the tactical piece of it, right? Where, know, when you think about the messy middle, if you will, with the day to day of the buyers with acknowledgements and promise dates and pricing mismatches, exceptions, it's almost like a leadership problem in some ways, because it's not just a systems problem. You're thinking about cultural change and what that means for chasing all the time and supply relationships. It's it is a as you transition into from the systems to the tax

It sounds like you guys have to really think through what that means for you as the impact on the day-to-day basis,

Steve Andrews (09:37)
the other thing that I think that large companies do better because they have organizations that are responsible for this, that small and medium companies struggle with, is master data governance. One of the biggest things I fight at medium-sized portfolio companies is each individual function has been able to build systems on their own in a vacuum. And now we're trying to scale them up so that consistent master data governance, only having one source of truth that flows through, it's clean and it's maintained clean.

⁓ the other thing that, know, when I was working in a large global pharmaceutical company, at the end of the day, across the globe, there were only five people, one on each continent that could approve a new item master for them. Now compare that to most small companies I go to, there's literally like 60 people in the organization that can create one.

Because their mindset is, well, if we can't create this, we can't get the order out. We can't serve the customer. we've, so when I tell them, no, you need to have less people, they absolutely fight that paradigm. And it's not until you look at how many duplicate item masters do we have? Well, I, or you're dealing with, well, the wrong part came in because it looked the same and we, this was the obsolete one and you know, whatever. And then you get.

then you get some buy-in to be like, hey, we have duplicates, the data's not right. Or what else we found on a financial system is I have a orange push button and I want to get a green one. Well, if I'm lazy and I copy the wrong thing, the item master might be assigned to the wrong GL code. So even though the right part came into supply chain, finance is having a fit.

because this thing is showing up in the wrong cost center, right? So I think it's that discipline of both the resources as well as master data governance that, because once the master data is wrong, now you start questioning what's coming out of the system.

Andrew (11:19)
Mmm.

Absolutely. Yeah, you know back obviously to the you know, data in data out junk in junk out model we were just talking about but it is very true. You know, it's it's interesting to think about the failure modes. And obviously the question that comes up is how do you evaluate the solution so you don't repeat that cycle? I always am curious on the buying playbook if you will like when you're evaluating procurement or supply chain automation.

What are your actual non-negotiables when you do the kind of down select review of the RFP?

Steve Andrews (12:02)
Well, let's talk about selection of the leverage application. I mean, that's a prime one. I reached out to four different providers that doing research looked like they could do it. Three of the four wanted me to implement their whole procure to pay system. I really just want a point solution. I'm not going to get approval for doing a whole new procure to pay. So that's part of it. The other one is,

is looking for trying to sift through what I call the snake oil salesman. If I'm talking with a software provider and they keep assuring me that their system can do everything and do it really well, right? That's a number one red flag, right? Be honest with me, what is your system do? What is your system not do? I've been around procurement long enough to know that no one system is good at every single facet of supply chain. So be honest with me where you fit, right?

Make sure can solve the point solution. The biggest thing to me and where leverage was excellent is following through on what you say. Like if you say you're going to do this, are you actually going to make that enhancement or make that fix? Are you going to do it in the timeline? One of the projects I had was I came in to be the IT program manager for an oil and gas company in the Middle East. I went there to do e-sourcing and CLM. I was

promoted up to the IT program manager. And I actually want to re-selecting eight of the 18 projects that we had to different providers because the providers that were picked did not follow through on anything that they said. And the thing that I really liked about the leverage team is like, if you say you're going to do something by Tuesday, then by God, by Tuesday, it was there. And we reworked the issues. So that's it.

looking at people that are watching this and saying, well, how do I know? Like if you're through the buying, but the buying cycle is like dating, right? Everybody's on their best possible behavior. If you're not getting good feedback and good responses during the buying cycle, you are not going to like the implementation team once you've signed the contract, right? So just cut to the chase, you know, quickly. So the thing that I liked about working with you and your team is you guys were honest, we can do this. We can't do that. Right? Cause when I asked you back then, this is years ago, right?

Hey, can you do three way match? You're like, no, man, we don't have three way match yet. It's something we're working on. And I truly appreciated that versus you being the sales guy and be like, yeah, I can do three way match. And you're building it in the background and I'm the guinea pig of it, right? So I really did appreciate that.

Andrew (14:33)
No, absolutely. I definitely agree. Especially, I think people underestimate how, you know, real manufacturing distributors, how critical mission systems are to mission processes. Right. And it's like, you can't just get 98 % of the way there. You have to get a hundred percent of way there. But also it is, you become a partner and extension of the core operations. Right. And so, you know, similar to like the dating side of it, I always think about like, what are the deal breakers?

Steve Andrews (14:55)
yeah.

Andrew (14:59)
It's like the things that look fine in a demo, but maybe fail in production. I think about for you, it's like, what's that demo trap you've learned to avoid or what questions do you ask the vendors that you've evaluated, but that they hate to hear those questions, but the operators inherently always need to really ask it, even if it's an uncomfortable question.

Steve Andrews (15:16)
I typically have access to a sandbox. Anybody that's smart can pull off a great demo, right? You can have people doing stuff in the background. You've staged the data that it works. So I always like to try to do like some kind of sandbox or give them a trial. Like, Hey, here's, here's a partial export of my PO file or whatever it is. Right? Like you process this, let me see what it looks like. And then let me evaluate. Cause you know, and

anybody can do a great demo, right? It's part of it, but I don't fully trust it, right? Because in the demo, you don't know like what actually works, what they've configured in the background or what it's going to flow through. And also just be reasonable of expectations. mean, AI does a lot, right? But for purchasing or POs, I think there is...

there's a fine line of like how leverage uses AI to figure things out and automate them. Part of it might be my age, but you know, I don't trust AI to tell me which vendor to go select yet at all. Right. I, I, I want it to summarize the data. Let me look at it, but I want to look at it and read it. Now that's a different than, Hey, I ordered a box and for this supplier, that box equals

24 or for another vendor equals something different. I that's a good use of AI and, know, automating the tool. But when you're watching a demo and it's telling you like, well, you know, you can reduce head count by this because the system is going to make these decisions for you. That makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck, to be honest with you.

Andrew (16:49)
Yeah, absolutely. I was actually talking to someone else, I think on a prior podcast. And it's interesting because I think people misunderstand some of the impact that we've at least observed by being in the trenches of where AI is impactful. And it really is where we've seen often is AI being very impactful for reducing the friction of getting things to the user, to the people in supply chain and the seats.

But we can't displace the decision. And even most of time, the recommendations are usually wrong because you have so much context and travel knowledge, but it's about accelerating what we always call like the, the space mountain ride. We're trying to help you guys get to that space mountain ride as often and frequently as possible. But we care about the line upfront that takes three hours to get to, to reduce that. I, you know, in the category of AI and

you know, sometimes snake oil, but ultimately ROI, you know, I think I'm always curious about how do you, how have you structured that narrative internally? Like when you think about, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to pick the solution. I'm going to launch it. And, know, there's obviously like narratives and some fluff, but how do you, how have you structured that, whether it's account avoidance, cycle time, air reduction, service level, margin leakage, leakage. I'm just thinking through how you frame that because it's obviously very impactful to get buy in, right?

Steve Andrews (18:08)
Yeah, the easiest way obviously is with hard savings, right? What does the system cost versus what is the alternative? Like, so when we had selected leverage, I was literally looking at adding two to three additional headcount. So that was a real hard savings number, right? So that is what actually got private equity to agree to it. Like, okay, we can spend this amount of money on this tool, or I can go hire three people and

What they literally were doing was opening, we issued, excuse me, hundreds of purchase orders a week. I mean, literally hundreds every single week, which meant we had to process hundreds of PO acknowledgments every week. Not only is that a lot of labor hours, but it's really tedious. Like who wants to come in and process purchase order and acknowledgments like on a weekly basis, right? So,

leading over to the soft cost of the equation, the soft cost of the equation was the buyer's team was infinitely more happy with their work balance, what they were doing at work, because they felt they were doing less monotonous tasks. And they were able to go into the leverage dashboard and say, well, I don't have order acknowledgments for these, or I have pricing discrepancies on this. And it wasn't them just doing the manual keying. So first of all, it's hard savings.

Then secondly is all the kind of soft costs, is, know, how happy is the team? What's the turnover rate? What's my likelihood of, cause I was smart enough to know I'm going to have a really hard time going to hire three people telling them, yeah, you're gonna, you're going to key in purchase order acknowledgements all day, every day. Right. I mean, who, who wants to do that? Right. So that's kind of how I look at it for, for a lot of the supply chains. So if we were talking strategic sourcing, right. Now we get into a lot of that.

margin erosion, things like that. The spot focus for me was, do I trust that this system is going to work and do all the purchase orders? And to your point, it's important that leverage processes POs every single day, because if we don't, we can't deliver the product to our utility customers. in a lot of the cases, that really matters because we have liquidated damages. So we don't deliver a system on time because we didn't get the parts in, that can cost us thousands of dollars a day.

Andrew (20:11)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. That makes total sense too, because I think building on some of the topics we've been talking already, know, AI people are like, great, AI is just going to hand wave and solve all of your problems. And that's not the reality. think what the reality is back to what we've seen and even working with you is that it's about deepening the value of very specific workflows that drive very specific, tangible, trackable metrics that we can go back to, which I think is key.

You know, it's interesting too, because you've had so many different adventures when it comes to professional ventures, when it comes to, you know, whether it's living through integrations, change management, &A environments, private equity. What have you seen get harder with like that parent company governance? And then also like just how do you keep momentum without breaking all the controls? You definitely have found a sweet spot in.

Steve Andrews (21:06)
the polite people have described me in a polite way as persistent. you can use other adjectives, but you know, you have to be able to make a use case, right? Now, the great thing that, that I tend to have is I have a long track record of successes, right? That can point to a previous companies. So that helps, right? Because,

Andrew (21:10)
Hahaha

Steve Andrews (21:25)
And then if you pick a good partner like you, like my credibility within the private equity firm and the company that, that put this in at went way up when, when leverage worked as well as it did. A lot of people were doubtful, but I was persistent and convincing enough to get them to sign up. Cause my, and my, know, and what, what leverage did really well in that equation as well was you did things that my IT team did not want to do. My team did not want to build APIs to all these different software.

Like all these different software is it to suppliers use, right? So I'm like, no, we have to do one API to leverage leverage will handle all the rest of it. No, what? So I think, you know, being able to articulate what the value is, what's the alternative if we don't do that, like you want to grow X this much per year. Well, you have to add this many resources are not going to be happy. We put the system in, you know, and we started small, right? So our first workflow is pretty easy. We didn't even have an API, right? It was this horrible.

secure FTP file exchange. And then we got them comfortable with that. And then it was like, okay, now, you know, they haven't, we haven't, you know, had any issues. There's no IT issues. They have way better IT security than we do. Let's do the API route, right? And because you handled all the APIs with all the suppliers, they didn't want to do your firms really good at supplier communication, right? Well, when we sit down with a new onboard supplier, you have the training and all the stuff that we.

don't really have time to do or aren't good at doing. So that was kind of like that fit. So being able to do that and push it through, you know, and for, for, you know, people watching this have been with the same company for a long time, you know, like I said, start small, get a success and then grow that success from there. Right. Because, you know, now, you know, we're, know, we've added some really substantial workflows to the leverage implementation with pricing and how does it update and, know, building off of that success and, ⁓ you know,

And I think it's, it's, it's opened the door to look at even more things, um, that we could do like three way matches or stuff like that. Right. So, I mean, that's kind of the, the, way I, I, that I approach it. I know it probably doesn't work for everybody that might be watching this, but, um, small wins being able to articulate the value and what's the alternative. Well, if I do nothing, what does that look?

Andrew (23:40)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it actually is also a great transition because, you know, getting the separate separation between good intentions and real outcomes, right? Like this, I think it's really impactful, especially for the listeners to hear about the implementation and the implementation reality and the staying power and how we think about adoption. From your perspective, what does a good implementation actually look like from how you've tackled this in the past? And

I think about that when it comes to, know, process and day to day roles about maintaining and sharing. doesn't go off the rails. Would love to hear your thoughts on that strategy.

Steve Andrews (24:16)
Well, even with the best strategy and the best team, right? Let's just realize there's going to be days the implementation is messy. So be prepared, prepare your team for that. Right? I mean, when we started on this, you know, I, I talked to the team and like, listen, we're going to have to work through a lot of item master conversions. We order it in each is it comes from the supplier and boxes or cases. Um, you know, we order it in linear feet, they sell it in sheets. So be prepared for that.

Be prepared to work through the errors, right? When we get errors, and you start small, right? Don't start with 50 suppliers out the gate. You know, our first run was five, right? And it was the five we were the most strategic with. And it's the five, and the way that I told them, like, listen, we want to go with the five suppliers that have the largest number of purchase orders. It's in both of our best interests to make this work, right? And what we try to do is a carrot and a stick.

Right? The carrot was, if we get this improvement and remember, we opened it up to them, like you can pick a multitude of different ways that you want to send the data to leverage. So y'all talk amongst yourselves and picks are we get, know, with your application, we gave them choices. The stick was look, after I implement this. A year from now, we're going to push volume to the suppliers that are on this system. Right? So if I've either the five of you.

only three of you want to do this. Well, all my purchases are going to go to the three that are on the system because I don't want to have to manually process that many PO acknowledgments, right? So, you know, and then we were lucky that we had suppliers that were also willing to work with us. And I think the way to structure that is we had the three year long-term agreement. It was a partnership and we're like, listen, invest upfront. Let's make this work.

And then, you know, we opened it up for them to also, you know, look at, I think we're doing it with what one looking at, like, you know, bi-directional transmission, right? So we weren't just the only one getting the data. like, Hey, if you want, we're sending the data to leverage. If you want leverage, just send you the data instead of your team keen in, let's open it up and let you do it. And, know, that's the way I structured it for, for this one, you know, specifically slightly different aside on the e-sourcing tool and.

contract lifecycle management though, you have to decide what are you going to do in the system? What's your global core? What are some of the localizations that you want to do? And be willing to say, if you want to use this tool, these are the rules you have to abide by. We're not just going to let anything in here, right? Not every one off crazy process. Like if you want to use this tool, this is what it supports. And by the way, if it doesn't go in the tool, it's because

Andrew (26:43)
you

Steve Andrews (26:53)
The business process you're trying to automate is not a sound business process.

Andrew (26:57)
That's actually a great commentary because I think something I always try to open up with even with net new customers now is that we're going to go through all this process. I personally believe that leverage is an exceptional platform and tool. However, it does bring the questions up. Is the current process something you want to maintain or do we want to change it? And I think that's a very important aspect, which you highlight around. have to fit, define that scope and box. And it's not always obvious and it's always not.

There's a little pain sometimes, a part of the journey, is Thinking about the audience, if you did have to give a peer a do this, not that checklist from procurement automation in today, like 2025, what do you think's on it? Are you thinking about how they're picking a tool, what they should or should not delegate, how do they measure success? We'd love to hear your framework.

Steve Andrews (27:27)
yeah.

We picking a tool is obviously important picking it. there's depending on the company, right? So the company that I was at had very specific business processes because of how they, how they built stuff for the utility. So we needed to find a tool that was more flexible than if I were like a typical manufacturing company, right? But I think it's be open to the fact that you

you need to use this implementation as a way to review and refine your current business process. Because most of them probably aren't best in class. mean, they've grown over time. You've gotten into a rut of doing them. But if you really want to scale and leverage a system, you're probably going to have to adjust your business process. So it's a trifecta of working with IT for the IT solution master data, working with a solution provider.

Where do I want to spend development money for you to go fix something or make something different? And where do I adjust my business process to better fit what the system and automation can do? And if you do those three things, you'll be successful. And it's kind of a balancing act. There's not a prescription. It's work in conjunction across those three, you areas.

Andrew (28:58)
I love that. Okay, well, as we start to wrap up, I always like to close out with a lightning round, kind of rapid fire operator guidance of, you know, questions. You ready? All right, love it. One metric every supply chain or procurement leader should look at weekly and why.

Steve Andrews (29:10)
Yeah, sure.

So from the perspective of like a leverage tool, right, is what percentage of my POs are being processed under leverage. From an e-sourcing tool, it's what percentage of my total spend is under management and what's my rogue spend.

Andrew (29:31)
Love that. Okay. One workflow you'd automate next if you had a magic wand.

Steve Andrews (29:36)
Three-way match. Our three-way match process is still arduous at best.

Andrew (29:37)
Mm.

Biggest myth in procurement tech right now.

Steve Andrews (29:43)
The AI can do everything right so I think we already talked about decision making but the other thing is is.

Andrew (29:45)
Mm.

Steve Andrews (29:51)
Quick example, I was asking about train passes for my next vacation in Switzerland and type it in. I'm going from here to here this many days. And it recommends these two wholeheartedly. Now I've been there before. So I was like, well, what about this other pass? And then it's like, oh, well, yeah, if I looking at this and then it kind of redoes its recommendation, you can't just

take everything AI gives you at absolute face value. In fact, is AI better than it was five years ago? Absolutely. But you you can't just type in a question, it spits out a result and run off with that as absolute truth and gospel, right?

Andrew (30:32)
Yeah, absolutely. A practice you wish you'd adopted earlier in your career.

Steve Andrews (30:38)
I think ⁓ thinking about that buyers is sitting in the buyer seat earlier. One of the reasons I think I do a better job at thinking through systems was after we did all these implementations, we had the, one of our clients called us back and said, Hey, we lost this person that was kind of maintaining the e-sourcing and contract system. Can you help us? This was way past go live. Can you help us? You know, with these things.

And then I saw they were actually using it, like, you know, intended path, actual path thing. And I think that helps me go forward envisioning how the system is going to work, how it's going to impact the buyer, how the data was. Early on, I was more worried about getting it in on time, on budget, making, know, getting it to work. I took less of the day to day life of the end user buyer into account.

Andrew (31:27)
I love that. that focusing on the user-centric design aspect and the empathy around that. The best way to earn adoption from a team that's been burned by systems before?

Steve Andrews (31:40)
Put in something small that works. Put in implement something small. It has to be meaningful. Right. But, you know, get that in that works and then you kind of gain that credibility back. Yeah.

Andrew (31:42)
I like that.

Trust building, right?

Final question. What would be a single piece of advice you'd give the younger Steve Andrews entering in procurement, supply chain, implementations, looking back at your career today?

Steve Andrews (32:07)
Make sure that you look at how the system is going to be used a year down the road, How is it going to be able to adapt and grow and how are the people interacting with it, a year from now, And then the second piece is just make sure that at the end of the day, whatever system you put in place, that master data has a way to get back into the ERP system. Even if it's processed offline somewhere,

make sure it gets back into ERP so it's not in its own silo and not be not able for, because that's also how systems get cut, right? So if you put a sourcing tool in and it's in its own island and it never flows back into ERP, somebody in IT is going to go across and look at the landscape and be like, well, I don't know what this thing does. So we're just going to cut funding on it.

Andrew (32:55)
Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, Steve, this was extremely insightful and practical. So first, thank you. For everyone listening, if you want more operator grade conversations like this, subscribe and share this episode with one person on your team who's constantly stuck in exceptions and also thinking through how to implement the best solutions. Steve, thanks again for joining. I'm Andrew Strupe. This is Leverage Supply Chains. See you next time.